When Mark told Rhea to leave, he did not shout at first.
That was what made it worse.
He stood in the doorway of the apartment they had once chosen together, one hand braced against the frame, the other holding the top of a black trash bag that bulged with her clothes. Behind him, the hallway light cast a yellow shape around his shoulders and made the polished floor look cold. His tie was still on from work. His cologne still hung in the air, sharp and expensive and newly foreign to her. He looked like a man about to explain a scheduling conflict, not destroy a life.
“Rhea, go,” he said.
She sat frozen on the edge of the sofa, one hand still resting on the dish towel in her lap. She had been folding laundry while waiting for him to come home. His dinner had gone cold on the stove twenty minutes earlier. There was ginger in the chicken, and garlic, and the rice had been done exactly the way he liked it—separate grains, not sticky. The apartment smelled like home-cooked food and fresh soap and the faint sweetness of the flowers she bought from the market that morning because she thought it might please him to come home to something pretty.
“What?” she asked.
Mark exhaled through his nose, already irritated that she had not made this easier. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act like you don’t understand.”
He dropped the bag to the floor. A shoe thudded somewhere inside it. He didn’t look at her with anger. He looked at her with something worse—disdain polished into certainty. The kind of certainty people mistake for honesty.
“We’re not compatible anymore,” he said.
